Today, a conversation about classified documents and how they keep turning up in places they don’t belong — such as the Mar-a-Lago, Florida, estate of former President Donald Trump. The latest revelation in this regard came on Tuesday (January 24), when it was revealed that lawyers for Mike Pence discovered what they described as “a small number” of documents in Pence’s Indiana home.
Last Friday, the FBI conducted a 13-hour search of President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and found an unknown quantity of documents. These are in addition to the material discovered earlier in his garage and in a room adjacent to the garage at the home, and at an office he used in Washington after his tenure as Vice President.
Beyond the initial questions of how these classified documents were removed from their original, secure filing locations — and for what purpose — there are the larger questions of who’s keeping track of these documents, and is our national security at risk?
On Midday today, Tom speaks speak with two individuals with unique perspectives on those questions.
Tom's first guest is Tyler Pager, a White House correspondent with The WashingtonPost since 2021. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and reported on the 2020 presidential campaign for Bloomberg News.
Tyler Pager joins us on our digital line from the Post newsroom in Washington, D.C.
Then, Tom speaks with Matthew Connelly, a professor of International and Global History at Columbia University and an expert on the US government's system of document classification. The author of several books on political history and international affairs, his latest — due to be published next month — is called The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets,
Professor Matthew Connelly joins us on Zoom from New York.
